Ceejay74's Personal Finance Blog

A blog to help me document my journey out of debt.

I'm the CFO of a three-adult, two-child, two-cat household. There's me (CJ, age 44), my husband (NT, age 44), my wife (AS, age 39), and our kids AA (age 7) and SL (age 5). Oh, and the cats are named Whiskey and Clue.

Until July 2007 we hadn't been serious about financial stability, but then we started focusing on paying down our massive debt, building an emergency fund and saving for retirement. In October 2010, we finished paying off all of our credit card debt--over $70,000! Adding in student loans and mortgages, we've paid off more than $250,000 of debt so far. In June 2015, we used a windfall to pay off all our remaining non-home-related debt!

Pragmatic - emergency preparedness. Research on cdc.gov, ready.gov & dps.mn.gov. Make a kit, make a plan, get informed. First aid training, e.g. CPR.
Jan: researched kits, plans and classes; bought some preparedness supplies for kit; cleaned out basement to make room for eventual emergency kit.
Feb: no progress

Work/professional development: Look for class on Agile; see if work will pay for it.
Jan: No progress
Feb: No progress

Work/professional development: Start to limit social/personal internet at work.
Jan: No personal internet/phone at work one day per week. DONE!
Feb: 2 days per week--done

Home: Full kitchen renovation. See what other improvements we can save up for after that.
Jan: Savings at $21,075

Vacations: UK family trip after Xmas. Solo trips for adults. Weekend at lake. CJ family reunion in June/July Niece's wedding in Va. in August.
Jan: some planning, nothing booked
Feb: time off booked for June/July and August trips

Big picture goals:

$512,564 in retirement assets by March 2019
Balance as of 1/31/2018: $404,682
Ultimate goal: 8x annual income by retirement

19 down, 31 to go on the new meals goal

May 24th, 2017 at 09:04 pm

Whew, it's been a crazy few weeks at my job. I traveled for work 4 days last week, and this week is me playing catchup. Plus it's our main client's fiscal year end on 5/31, so it would've been nuts without being mostly out of commission for four days.

The bad: Yesterday I came home from work, made dinner, then pretty much worked until 1:30am on a project I totally hadn't wanted to take, because I had more than enough on my plate. And it was for this PowerPoint where I'd presented an outline that the client got really confused about and thought it was meant to be the piece itself, so she thought I'd really "missed the mark."

The good: I got a really big compliment from two clients yesterday, emailed to an account exec. She forwarded it to all the execs and supervisors, and today I got a nice note from my two direct supervisors and a $100 Amex gift card! Oh, and the client that was confused about my outline yesterday was really happy with the actual writing I stayed up late to do, so I fixed that little snafu.

Anyway, I came on here to record progress on my new meals goal. I knew it was going to be busy this week (though I couldn't have guessed HOW busy) but wanted to try a new meal. So I decided to do "loaded fries." Essentially it was frozen fries, baked in the oven, topped with lots of cheddar cheese partway through. Then people could add chili (heated up from a can), green onions, veggie bacon and tofu sour cream. It actually went over really well, even with AS who's not crazy about chili and our youngest who's not big into fries. Oh, and I roasted some cauliflower so we'd have something healthy with it. Would definitely do this again for a week when we're busy and/or not trying to spend much! That's 19 new recipes tried, 31 to go.